In this case you can still lose hour worth of data. Multiply this with whole city/company scale. Paying a ransom for preventing this much effort going waste would still worth something.
Then these are incompetent people who forget to multiply the cost of the ransom by the amount of times it will likely repeat if they don't refuse to discuss with abductors.
It's like saying "why would we put this guy is jail? He's committed a crime but it's done now". Yeah, sure. Except without a deterrent he'll do it again tomorrow. This is the same except it gets rid if the motive instead.
